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A
pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart. There
was nothing extraordinary in the tale: any woman would have done as much for
a neighbour's child. But it was
just like Ellen, he felt, to have rushed in bareheaded, carrying the boy in
her arms, and to have dazzled poor Mrs. Winsett into forgetting to ask who
she was.
"That
is the Countess Olenska--a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."
"Whew--a
Countess!" whistled Ned Winsett. "Well,
I didn't know Countesses were so neighbourly.
Mingotts ain't."
"They
would be, if you'd let them."
"Ah,
well--" It was their old
interminable argument as to the obstinate unwillingness of the "clever
people" to frequent the fashionable, and both men knew that there was
no use in prolonging it.
"I
wonder," Winsett broke off, "how a Countess happens to live in our
slum?"
"Because
she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any of our little
social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in his own picture
of her.
"H'm--been
in bigger places, I suppose," the other commented.
"Well, here's my corner."
He
slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him and musing
on his last words.
Ned
Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most interesting
thing about him, and always made Archer wonder why they had allowed him to
accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are still struggling.
Archer
had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never seen them.
The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of
journalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett had
proposed to go for a bock. He
had given Archer to understand that his wife was an invalid; which might be
true of the poor lady, or might merely mean that she was lacking in social
gifts or in evening clothes, or in both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social
observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it
cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to consider
that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest
budget, regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring
"Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people, who changed
their clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on the
number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less self-conscious
than the others. Nevertheless, he was always stimulated by Winsett, and
whenever he caught sight of the journalist's lean bearded face and
melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner and carry him off for a
long talk.
Winsett
was not a journalist by choice. He
was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of
letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary
appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty
given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per
contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his
real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where
fashion- plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories
and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On
the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was
inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile
bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his
own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all,
contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests
and curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views
usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.
"The
fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had once
said. "I'm down and out;
nothing to be done about it. I've
got only one ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't
be in my time. But you're free
and you're well-off. Why don't
you get into touch? There's
only one way to do it: to go into politics."
Archer
threw his head back and laughed. There
one saw at a flash the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and
the others--Archer's kind. Every
one in polite circles knew that, in America, "a gentleman couldn't go
into politics." But, since
he could hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively:
"Look at the career of the honest man in American politics!
They don't want us."
"Who's
`they'? Why don't you all get
together and be `they' yourselves?"
Archer's
laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile.
It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the
melancholy fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in
municipal or state politics in New York.
The day was past when that sort of thing was possible: the country
was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant, and decent people had to
fall back on sport or culture.
"Culture!
Yes--if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here
and there for lack of--well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants
of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them.
But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no
competition, no audience. You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house:
`The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll
never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get
right down into the muck. That,
or emigrate . . . God! If I could emigrate . . ."
Archer
mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back to books,
where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting. Emigrate! As if
a gentleman could abandon his own country!
One could no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go
down into the muck. A gentleman
simply stayed at home and abstained. But
you couldn't make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the New York
of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it seem
more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a smaller box, with a
more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue.
The
next morning Archer scoured the town in vain for more yellow roses.
In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office,
perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was
filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life. Why should he not be, at that moment, on the sands of St.
Augustine with May Welland? No
one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity. In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr.
Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in the management of
large estates and "conservative" investments, there were always
two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition,
who, for a certain number of hours of each day, sat at their desks
accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the newspapers.
Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an occupation,
the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and the
law, being a profession, was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than
business. But none of these
young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession, or any
earnest desire to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the
perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading.
It
made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too.
He had, to be sure, other tastes and interests; he spent his
vacations in European travel, cultivated the "clever people" May
spoke of, and generally tried to "keep up," as he had somewhat
wistfully put it to Madame Olenska. But
once he was married, what would become of this narrow margin of life in
which his real experiences were lived?
He had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream,
though perhaps less ardently, and who had gradually sunk into the placid and
luxurious routine of their elders.
From
the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame Olenska, asking if he might
call that afternoon, and begging her to let him find a reply at his club;
but at the club he found nothing, nor did he receive any letter the
following day. This unexpected
silence mortified him beyond reason, and though the next morning he saw a
glorious cluster of yellow roses behind a florist's window-pane, he left it
there. It was only on the third
morning that he received a line by post from the Countess Olenska. To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff, whither the
van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting the Duke on board his
steamer.
"I
ran away," the writer began abruptly (without the usual preliminaries),
"the day after I saw you at the play, and these kind friends have taken
me in. I wanted to be quiet,
and think things over. You were
right in telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safe here. I wish that you were with us." She ended with a conventional "Yours sincerely,"
and without any allusion to the date of her return.
The
tone of the note surprised the young man.
What was Madame Olenska running away from, and why did she feel the
need to be safe? His first
thought was of some dark menace from abroad; then he reflected that he did
not know her epistolary style, and that it might run to picturesque
exaggeration. Women always
exaggerated; and moreover she was not wholly at her ease in English, which
she often spoke as if she were translating from the French.
"Je me suis evadee--" put in that way, the opening sentence
immediately suggested that she might merely have wanted to escape from a
boring round of engagements; which was very likely true, for he judged her
to be capricious, and easily wearied of the pleasure of the moment.
It
amused him to think of the van der Luydens' having carried her off to
Skuytercliff on a second visit, and this time for an indefinite period.
The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened to
visitors, and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered to the few thus
privileged. But Archer had
seen, on his last visit to Paris, the delicious play of Labiche, "Le
Voyage de M. Perrichon," and he remembered M. Perrichon's dogged and
undiscouraged attachment to the young man whom he had pulled out of the
glacier. The van der Luydens had rescued Madame Olenska from a doom almost
as icy; and though there were many other reasons for being attracted to her,
Archer knew that beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination
to go on rescuing her.
He
felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away; and almost
immediately remembered that, only the day before, he had refused an
invitation to spend the following Sunday with the Reggie Chiverses at their
house on the Hudson, a few miles below Skuytercliff.
He
had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at Highbank, with
coasting, ice-boating, sleighing, long tramps in the snow, and a general
flavour of mild flirting and milder practical jokes.
He had just received a box of new books from his London book- seller,
and had preferred the prospect of a quiet Sunday at home with his spoils.
But he now went into the club writing-room, wrote a hurried telegram,
and told the servant to send it immediately.
He knew that Mrs. Reggie didn't object to her visitors' suddenly
changing their minds, and that there was always a room to spare in her
elastic house.
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